Sabine Hossenfelder
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2024
13:41 · 3.5M views · Apr 5, 2024
Sabine Hossenfelder explains why she left academia, criticizing its incentives, funding and career structure. She gives a personal account of the social problems in science.
HN users cite it in threads about academia, grant incentives, fraud and women-only programs, often as an eye-opening personal take.
10 comments from Hacker News
On a tangent, this video[0] from Sabine Hossenfelder about academics in general is eye opening. In comments, veritasium[1] agrees: >After finishing my PhD I went to a university-led session on ‘What Comes Next.’ What I heard sounded a lot like “now, you beg for money.” It was so depressing to think about all the very clever people in that room who had worked so very hard only to find out they had no financial security and would be spending most of their days asking for money. I realised that even what I thought of as the ‘safe path’ was uncertain so I may as well go after what I truly want. That led me here. EDIT: Typos [0]. this video [1]. [LINK]
I love Sabine Hossenfelder's personal take on the social problems in science ( this video ), which reminded me a lot of my own experience in academic science. She also has some critiques of particle physics that I find compelling - but outside my knowledge domain - where the sociological dynamics sound similar to things I've bumped into in biology.
I know that this will probably be down-voted to death but I don't like these hyperbolic takes. I know that Sabine did use this title for click-bate purposes that she is now mostly doing YouTube videos (she had horrible experience that unfortunately not rare in scientific community [1]). I understand that the field of particle physics which is the corner stone in fundamental physics is not showing the great advances that it used to have a couple of decades ago. But I think people really don't understand that the field is still advancing and although these advances are less catchy to be reported in mainstream (and don't get traction if posted on HN) it is not dead or dying. There is a reason why we had a particle data group updating the PDG [2] each two years (you can order physical copies for free but please don't do if you don't need one). People were writing about that since after the big discovery of Higgs boson (that was 12 years ago). We still have a lot of measurement and puzzles that is less about unification theory that people usually would talk about. Theory people are coming up with all different ideas even if some are not testable now but that job of theorist is mainly come up with ideas and help bridge the gap later. I would suggest everyone interested in this topic to read the electroweak current chapter of the book called "How experiments End" [3] to understand a historical example to how we approached the standard model when it was first proposed. Most of the pa
> There are numerous of cases of financiers, academics, etc. who have been expelled because they have corrected their beliefs in contrary to the groups. The best thing to do is leave. Once you cross that Rubicon, never think "I can change this system/institution from within". You will die on that hill. I wish people had better psychological education and preparation to understand what institutions are. Realistic preparation before joining the police, army, government, or academia would help many people avoid so much suffering - and make those institutions "better" by making it easier for differently-thinking individuals to get out and start new movements or institutions. It's really hard, because sometimes ones whole identity gets wrapped up in that group. Cult leavers often talk about this. Rejecting the ideas is the comparatively easy part. Escaping the people is harder. But hardest of all is escaping the part of yourself that identifies. Sorry I don't have a better link to this video [0], but it matches my experience, of waking up one day in an in institution I had outgrown, surrounded by tiny-minded, compliant, insecure, mutually hostile, self-deluding people. It takes courage to move on. [0] this video
>, I wish Sabine Hossenfelder didn't have to leave academia. [...] I understand that she is catering to the audience but this is one example why alignment of the incentives works. Before, she was earning her living as a working physicist so she did not have to cater to anyone actually But this obscures the fact that she was still "catering to the audience" when working in academia as a paid physicist. She was just placating a different audience and worked on topics she really didn't think was groundbreaking just to keep the grant money rolling in. The misalignment of incentives just happened outside of Youtube. Deep link to her explanation: this video A lot of viewers wish that "content creator" wasn't a thing and people just did Youtube for free as a hobby. Understandable. But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships."